Hi, I just installed Debian's "ftp" package and want to use it to download all files from another server of mine. I can log in and download individual files, but I don't know how I would tell the client to download _everything_ rather than one file at a time. It's over 5000 files, I'd hate to do it by hand, lol.

Thanks,
Martin

I don't regularly use FTP, but you may try to use wildcards when obtaining the files.

Here's how wildcards work:

* means any character, any number of characters. Anything, basically.
For example:

* = any file - can be used to download ALL files.
*.html = any file with the HTML extension
cat* = any file that begins with "cat" and has any character(s) after it.

? means ONE character, whatever it may be.

For example:

??? = any three-character-long file.
lib??????.so = any file that begins with "lib", followed by six characters of any kind, and ends in ".so"

These are the two that I can think of off the top of my head but I'm sure they're others!

Let us know how you get on!

get doesn't accept wild-cards.

To be able to use a wildcard you'll need to use
mget *
To NOT be asked for each file you want to turn
prompting off (it's on by default).
So, a sensible thing (once you're logged in) would be:
bin
prom
mget *




Cheers,
Tink

Seems like mget * won't work. Instead, I had to use mget subdir/*. Well, it's still a lot better than grabbing all of them by hand.

Thanks for your input. I'll be back with more stupid questions soon.

Well, yeah ... the standard ftp tools know nothing
about recursion. The mget * would have worked
if you had done a "cd subdir" first.



Cheers,
Tink

Ok, I see now. Thanks.

Oops, my bad! only made an assumption because of the ability to use them in the shell.